How a Snapchat ad account is organised: campaign, ad squad and ad

What each of the three levels controls

The campaign is the top level. It carries the objective (for example Traffic, Leads, Sales or Awareness & Engagement), the name, the start time and, optionally, a campaign-level daily budget. Snapchat documents a minimum of 20 currency units for a campaign daily budget. The campaign is also where you declare that the ads fall into a regulated category such as employment, housing or credit.

The ad squad is where almost everything that decides delivery lives: the audience (location, age, gender, language, interests, custom audiences), placements, the optimization goal, the bid strategy and the squad's daily budget. Snapchat documents a minimum of 5 currency units for an ad squad daily budget. If you want to test two audiences, you create two ad squads in the same campaign.

The ad is the smallest unit and points to a creative: the vertical image or video, a headline of up to 34 characters, a brand name of up to 32 characters, a button and the link. Several ads can share one ad squad, so you can compare creatives against the same audience and budget.

A practical consequence: if results change, ask which level changed. A new audience is a new ad squad. A new image or headline is a new ad. A different goal needs a different campaign. Keeping that mapping in your head makes reports readable and keeps tests clean, because only one level changes at a time.

Why the split matters

You know where to look for a budget, a bid, an audience or a link before you open a screen.
Tests stay interpretable: one audience per ad squad, one creative per ad.
Reports can be read level by level, so a weak creative is not mistaken for a weak audience.

Plan the structure before you build it

Write down the single business goal first (for example: driver applications through a mobile form), then pick the campaign objective that matches it.
Name the campaign with the goal and month, and name each ad squad after its audience, so names explain the structure in reports.
Create one ad squad per audience you want to compare, each with its own daily budget of at least the documented minimum.
Add two or three ads to each ad squad that differ in one thing only, such as the first three seconds of the video.
Review the structure as a tree before launch: one goal, a few audiences, a few creatives per audience.

Good to know

AdAce Ads reads this structure for connected Snapchat accounts and creates new campaigns, ad squads and ads paused. The Snapchat integration is built and in early access; no live accounts have been connected yet, so treat any description of it as capability, not as results.
Level names in the interface can differ from the API names. If a label looks different, find the setting by what it controls, not by its name.

Sources and further reading

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